On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Roger Burton West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 03:16:32PM -0800, Captain Joy wrote: > >What would TL10 sea-going vessels be like? Specifically, on 50 year old > TL10(11) colony on a world that has 95% hydrographic > >coverage? This is a Star Trek (30 years before the original series) > universe. I've set the Federation tech level at 11^ with > >medical tech at 9. > > On a world like that, I'd expect to see some very massive storms - so > the big ships may well be submarines, with nuclear or chemical power > plants depending on size. I seem to remember that supercavitation is > fairly practical at TL10, so the small fast ones will use that. > > Of course, they may have weather control up and running, in which case > they might go for surface ships of various sorts - SWATH, perhaps. > >
And it's straw tek, so it's more likely they're TL8 ships, with some fancy gadgets, where the plot demands they break. In reality, what you'd see (on earth) will be a continuation of the current trend towards bigger ships. Bigger ships are faster for a given energy input. TL10 gets fusion power, so the ships will be as big as can fit through the various bottle necks. (In the 21st century, that's the size of a ship that can fit through Suez.) -- David Scheidt [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
